Freelance Copywriter

Who Has My Name?

Who Has My Name?

A self-Google odyssey

When I set up my website, I decided to stick with my own name, rather than a clever sounding business name (Content Contentment was what I had in mind, though I bet someone, somewhere has taken that one already).

As I was using my own name, I wanted to know what happened when somebody searched for me. I wanted to make sure I didn’t share a name with somebody who had done something unfortunate. The freelance work coming my way might drop off, if, say, someone with my name hit the news for a spate of farmyard based sex crimes. Thankfully -for both my freelance career and the farm animal’s welfare- they haven’t. I didn’t want to be like Peter Sutcliffe, an Operation Manager from London, or Ted Bundy, who lives in Chicago and works in sales. Neither of them will be the first to appear should they ever self-Google.

Graham Fielding: the competition

A little cursory research using Tracesmart reveals that there are around 30 people who share my name in the UK alone. Thirty Graham Fieldings doing the rounds? What does that mean for me, the owner of a website called www.grahamfielding.co.uk? How do I fare against these other Graham Fieldings? How do I avoid being mistaken for one of these name-twins? Let’s see.

Worryingly, there is a business writer called Graham Fielding. He grabbed the .com website long before I came along, and may prove to be my biggest competitor. Having said that, his blog appears to have been dormant for some time.

Let me introduce the healthiest Graham Fielding of us all, a cyclist and a Metallica fan to boot. There is no competition between us, as my bike is burried beneath a set of my father’s golf clubs in a house I no longer live in.

This guy has got his name on upside down. Fielding R. Graham? I don’t even know where to start.